Rheological properties of mono- and polydomain liquid crystalline elastomers exhibiting a broad smectic A phase

We investigate the rheological properties of polydomain smectic A Side-Chai n Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (SCLCE) by dynamic shear and compression me asurements and find a very similar behavior for both experiments, We show t hat the dynamic shear modulus G' is independent of a precompression applied to the sample. In addition, we present the first dynamic measurements of t he anisotropy of G' observed for the corresponding Liquid Single Crystal El astomers (LSCE). We find that these monodomains show dynamically a dramatic difference depending on whether the shear is in a plane parallel or perpen dicular to the layer normal, demonstrating the in-plane fluidity of the sme ctic layering.